After sponsoring React Rally in Utah, and ReactEurope in France this summer, there's one thing that’s extremely evident: The ReactJS ecosystem is moving very quickly.

In less than two months since ReactEurope, significant progress occured in GraphQL and ReactNative, with both generating even more excitement than at ReactEurope.

Particularly interesting was Nick Schrock of Facebook's take on ReactNative and GraphQL together. He made some insighful remarks in our interview with him:

"If you think about React as a horizontal platform, which unites programming models on top of all these proprietary platforms without sacrificing quality...we conceptualize GraphQL as a similar thing, a horizontal platform across varying backends, and between these we can move development forward a lot."

Nick also lamented the state of mobile development tooling, stating, "the shift to mobile has been an incredible shift for users, but for devs it has been a ten-year step backward." He was also extremely excited about the impact of ReactNative on this state of affairs, saying "React Native is what should be the crown jewel of Facebook's open source offerings, because it really is transformational."

Watch the entire interview with Nick Schrock from Facebook

More Conference Highlights

The excitement extended far past GraphQL and ReactNative as well. With Relay and Redux the React ecosystem is clearly rapidly evolving, as all frameworks tend to learn, share, steal, and develop together.

Andrew D’Amelio, a JavaScript developer from Rangle.io who attended React Rally on August 24-25, 2015, said, “The React space is growing really fast and a lot of people are getting involved, making it an exciting time for us to be involved.” His favourite talk demonstrated a GraphQL tool, using the StarWars API (see here: graphql-swapi.parseapp.com/graphiql/). “The talk highlighted the paradigm shift that GraphQL enables for front-end web development, especially when building apps around an API,” he said. “Dave Smith also gave a really funny talk entitled 'How React Literally Waters My Lawn'. This talk was just pure enjoyment, and a nice change from the more 'serious' talks,” he said. Overall, the speaker lineup was excellent, and the attendees came from all over the world, and a variety of industries.

Nick van Weerdenburg, Rangle.io’s CEO was able to interview nearly all 20 speakers at the 2-day conference, and along with the organizers will be releasing the informative video interviews on YouTube. You can follow @Rangleio on Twitter, to get the latest links. In the meantime, we’ve included a couple more of the interviews below.

More Video Interviews from React Rally

Lee Byron from Facebook

Lee Byron discusses the philosophy of GraphQL, including how it lends to thinking of the data layer in terms of components nested within other components in the data layer, and how that aligns well with React.

Christopher Chedeau from Facebook

Christopher Chedeau talks about how animation and gestures are core components of mobile applications and the current state of React animations.